Intelligibility (philosophy)
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End-to-End Waveform Utterance Enhancement for Direct Evaluation Metrics Optimization by Fully Convolutional Neural Networks Open
Speech enhancement model is used to map a noisy speech to a clean speech. In the training stage, an objective function is often adopted to optimize the model parameters. However, in the existing literature, there is an inconsistency betwee…
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Learning Complex Spectral Mapping With Gated Convolutional Recurrent Networks for Monaural Speech Enhancement Open
Phase is important for perceptual quality of speech. However, it seems intractable to directly estimate phase spectra through supervised learning due to their lack of spectrotemporal structure in it. Complex spectral mapping aims to estima…
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The Impact of Auditory Spectral Resolution on Listening Effort Revealed by Pupil Dilation Open
Intelligibility scores alone were not sufficient to quantify the effort required to understand speech with poor resolution. Degraded spectral resolution results in increased effort required to understand speech, even when intelligibility i…
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Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Speech Enhancement and Noise-Robust Speaker Verification Open
Improving speech system performance in noisy environments remains a\nchallenging task, and speech enhancement (SE) is one of the effective\ntechniques to solve the problem. Motivated by the promising results of\ngenerative adversarial netw…
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Towards reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex Open
Auditory stimulus reconstruction is a technique that finds the best approximation of the acoustic stimulus from the population of evoked neural activity. Reconstructing speech from the human auditory cortex creates the possibility of a spe…
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Extended high-frequency hearing enhances speech perception in noise Open
Significance Understanding speech in noisy environments is an essential communication skill that varies widely between individuals and is poorly understood. We show here that extended high-frequency (EHF) hearing, beyond the currently test…
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Gated Residual Networks With Dilated Convolutions for Monaural Speech Enhancement Open
For supervised speech enhancement, contextual information is important for accurate mask estimation or spectral mapping. However, commonly used deep neural networks (DNNs) are limited in capturing temporal contexts. To leverage long-term c…
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Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations Open
We propose using self-supervised discrete representations for the task of\nspeech resynthesis. To generate disentangled representation, we separately\nextract low-bitrate representations for speech content, prosodic information,\nand speak…
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Large-scale training to increase speech intelligibility for hearing-impaired listeners in novel noises Open
Supervised speech segregation has been recently shown to improve human speech intelligibility in noise, when trained and tested on similar noises. However, a major challenge involves the ability to generalize to entirely novel noises. Such…
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Rapid Release From Listening Effort Resulting From Semantic Context, and Effects of Spectral Degradation and Cochlear Implants Open
People with hearing impairment are thought to rely heavily on context to compensate for reduced audibility. Here, we explore the resulting cost of this compensatory behavior, in terms of effort and the efficiency of ongoing predictive lang…
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Lip movements entrain the observers’ low-frequency brain oscillations to facilitate speech intelligibility Open
During continuous speech, lip movements provide visual temporal signals that facilitate speech processing. Here, using MEG we directly investigated how these visual signals interact with rhythmic brain activity in participants listening to…
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Effects of face masks on acoustic analysis and speech perception: Implications for peri-pandemic protocols Open
Wearing face masks (alongside physical distancing) provides some protection against infection from COVID-19. Face masks can also change how people communicate and subsequently affect speech signal quality. This study investigated how three…
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Musical training, individual differences and the cocktail party problem Open
Are musicians better able to understand speech in noise than non-musicians? Recent findings have produced contradictory results. Here we addressed this question by asking musicians and non-musicians to understand target sentences masked by…
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Predicting Early Bulbar Decline in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Speech Subsystem Approach Open
Purpose . To develop a predictive model of speech loss in persons with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) based on measures of respiratory, phonatory, articulatory, and resonatory functions that were selected using a data-mining approach.…
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Deep learning for minimum mean-square error approaches to speech enhancement Open
Recently, the focus of speech enhancement research has shifted from minimum mean-square error (MMSE) approaches, like the MMSE short-time spectral amplitude (MMSE-STSA) estimator, to state-of-the-art masking- and mapping-based deep learnin…
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Objective Quality and Intelligibility Prediction for Users of Assistive Listening Devices: Advantages and limitations of existing tools Open
This article presents an overview of twelve existing objective speech quality and intelligibility prediction tools. Two classes of algorithms are presented, namely intrusive and non-intrusive, with the former requiring the use of a referen…
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Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score Open
Listening effort is a valuable and important notion to measure because it is among the primary complaints of people with hearing loss. It is tempting and intuitive to accept speech intelligibility scores as a proxy for listening effort, bu…
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Speech Vision: An End-to-End Deep Learning-Based Dysarthric Automatic Speech Recognition System Open
Dysarthria is a disorder that affects an individual's speech intelligibility due to the paralysis of muscles and organs involved in the articulation process. As the condition is often associated with physically debilitating disabilities, n…
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Assessment of Speech Intelligibility in Parkinson’s Disease Using a Speech-To-Text System Open
Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) may have difficulties in speaking because of reduced coordination of the muscles that control breathing, phonation, articulation, and prosody. Symptoms that may occur are weakening of the volume of th…
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The relationship of speech intelligibility with hearing sensitivity, cognition, and perceived hearing difficulties varies for different speech perception tests Open
Listeners vary in their ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Hearing sensitivity, as measured by pure-tone audiometry, can only partly explain these results, and cognition has emerged as another key concept. Although cogniti…
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The Blizzard Challenge 2017 Open
The Blizzard Challenge 2009 was the fifth annual Blizzard Challenge. As in 2008, UK English and Mandarin Chinese were the chosen languages for the 2009 Challenge. The English corpus was the same one used in 2008. The Mandarin corpus was pr…
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Predicting Speech Intelligibility Decline in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Based on the Deterioration of Individual Speech Subsystems Open
Articulatory impairments characterized by reduced velocities of lip and jaw movements and resonatory impairments characterized by increased nasal airflow served as the subsystem predictors of the longitudinal decline of speech intelligibil…
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Neural Additive Models: Interpretable Machine Learning with Neural Nets Open
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful black-box predictors that have achieved impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks. However, their accuracy comes at the cost of intelligibility: it is usually unclear how they make their dec…
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Speech intelligibility assessment of protective facemasks and air-purifying respirators Open
Speech Intelligibility (SI) is the perceived quality of sound transmission. In healthcare settings, the ability to communicate clearly with coworkers, patients, etc., is crucial to quality patient care and safety. The objectives of this st…
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Objective and subjective voice outcomes after total laryngectomy: a systematic review Open
Studies on speech outcomes after TL are flawed in design and represent weak levels of evidence. There is an urge for standardized measurement tools for evaluations of substitute voice speakers. TES is the favorable speech rehabilitation me…
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Effect of masks on speech intelligibility in auralized classrooms Open
This study explored the effects of wearing face masks on classroom communication. The effects of three different types of face masks (fabric, surgical, and N95 masks) on speech intelligibility (SI) presented to college students in auralize…
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Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe Open
By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results…
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Impact of Noise and Noise Reduction on Processing Effort: A Pupillometry Study Open
Objectives: Speech perception in adverse listening situations can be exhausting. Hearing loss particularly affects processing demands, as it requires increased effort for successful speech perception in background noise. Signal processing …
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Distinct processing of ambiguous speech in people with non-clinical auditory verbal hallucinations Open
Auditory verbal hallucinations (hearing voices) are typically associated with psychosis, but a minority of the general population also experience them frequently and without distress. Such 'non-clinical' experiences offer a rare and unique…
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Directions for the future of technology in pronunciation research and teaching Open
This paper reports on the role of technology in state-of-the-art pronunciation research and instruction, and makes concrete suggestions for future developments. The point of departure for this contribution is that the goal of second langua…